Living memories

Kazuo Ishiguro grew up in Guildford but vividly recalls his early childhood in Nagasaki. He wrote songs and became a social worker before studying creative writing. Early success culminated in The Remains of the Day, which was filmed and won the Booker; its successor, The Unconsoled, was strongly criticised. Now 50, he has written a novel about clones.

Kazuo Ishiguro, on this year's longlist for Never Let Me Go, is recognised as one of the UK's finest contemporary authors Eamonn McCabe/Guardian

Kazuo Ishiguro's early career set a modern benchmark for precocious literary success. Born in 1954, in 1982 he won the Winifred Holtby award for the best expression of a sense of place, for his debut novel A Pale View of Hills . In 1983, he was included in the seminal Granta best of young British writers list, alongside Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Rose Tremain and Pat Barker. Three years later his second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, picked up the Whitbread book of the year and in 1989 his third, The Remains of the Day, won the Booker. David Lodge, chair of the judges, praised the depiction of a between-the-wars country-house butler's self-deception as a "cunningly structured and beautifully paced performance", which succeeds in rendering with "humour and pathos a memorable character and explores the large, vexed theme of class, tradition and duty". At 34, Ishiguro's place in the literary firmament was already secure and he felt as if he'd only just begun.

"And then I had this most alarming realisation. I looked at an encyclopaedia of literature and checked how old people were when they wrote their famous works. Pride and Prejudice was written by someone in her 20s. The Faulkner anyone remembers comes from his 30s. It goes on; Fitzgerald, Kafka, Chekhov; War and Peace, Ulysses. Dickens went on a bit longer, but his best work was when he was younger. Of course there are exceptions but often, like Conrad, who was a sailor, there is some reason why they missed out on time earlier in their lives."

He says the fact that great writers are often revered and rewarded with prizes in old age only masks the reality that time is running out. "There was this idea, which felt almost like a conspiracy, that a writer in his 30s was early in a writing life. But I realised you should think more in terms of the length and timing of a footballer's career. Your best chance of producing a decent book comes somewhere between 30 and 45 and I suddenly saw my life as a finite number of books."

For Ishiguro, now 50, his theory is understandably "a depressing thing to think about". The rewards have already come his way. He has an OBE and the French Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. A portrait of him by Peter Edwards hung for a time in 10 Downing Street and when the Japanese emperor visited the UK, Ishiguro was invited to the state banquet. He remembers an impatient Lady Thatcher queuing behind him to meet the emperor. In literary terms, he responded by consciously ignoring considerations of what might be commercially successful and abjuring the many lucrative but time-consuming distractions that came his way; "Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write."

It is a sensible and high-minded strategy, but few people realised just how serious Ishiguro was about implementing it. In the 16 years since The Remains of the Day he has produced only three novels. And when The Unconsoled finally appeared in 1995, its 500-plus pages about the dream-like peregrinations of a concert pianist around a hazy Mitteleuropa left readers and reviewers baffled and occasionally angry. Critic James Wood went so far as to claim the book had "invented its own category of badness".

However, almost as soon as the critical storm broke, it abated. Anita Brookner, an early critic, asked to re-review the book and declared: "I can't see how he could have got it more right." And Wood, in reviewing Ishiguro's next book, When We Were Orphans (2000), about a British private detective in 1930s Shanghai, returned to his dismissal of The Unconsoled to note that if Ishiguro hadn't written it he might have been condemned to become a novelist whose work was "as similar as postage stamps". Wood then praised Orphans, claiming it "invents its own category of goodness".

Looking at Ishiguro's oeuvre, a series of clear and coherent themes emerge. Barry Lewis of Sunderland University has written a critical study of Ishiguro's work and notes that "notions of identity and how an individual sustains a sense of self as historical circumstances cast a new light on events is something he returns to time and again. It links to the sense of how memory might be used as a tool to keep your dignity and maintain a sense of self."

Ishiguro's latest novel, Never Let Me Go, is published next month and again reflects some of these preoccupations. It opens in a boarding school - the atmosphere conjured in his books is unmistakable - and we gradually learn that the children are clones bred to one day donate their organs for transplant. Ishiguro, who undertook some basic research into biotechnology, says he never intended to write a mystery with their clone status as the revelation. "If information does trickle gradually it's because the children themselves do not realise who they are. The reader is on a sort of parallel journey, but it is not a mystery story. My focus is elsewhere."

Gabriele Annan, reviewing an earlier novel in the New York Review of Books, noted that "After one puts down his novels, insights go on plopping into one's mind like drops from a tap that is supposed to be turned off." Ishiguro says it was the metaphorical framework, "as usual", that attracted him to this latest story, and suggests his attraction to metaphors that work in this way comes partly from film. He has a home cinema in his north London home - with special seating and blackout blinds - and speaks admiringly of the work of Hollywood screenwriters in films such as The Magnificent Seven and the Eddie Murphy vehicle, Beverly Hills Cop. "Sometimes popular films will tap into certain general fears and aspirations of their audience without the audience overtly realising what has happened. So they get the story on its own terms but it has an additional emotional impact because of the metaphorical reverberations. At some level that story taps into something deeper."

But while he says his core concerns haven't changed that much from book to book, his appreciation of how the world works probably has. His describes his early novels as being written by a young man speculating as to what it would be like to look in old age on the decisions made during a lifetime. "They were almost pre-emptive warnings to myself," he says. "When you are young, things like your moral stance and your political position seem very important. I'd spend long nights with my friends sorting out moral and political positions that we thought would take us through adult life. And part of that would end up meaning we despised some people not for what they did, but for the opinions they professed to hold. But as I've got older I think I've realised that while it is important to have principles, you have far less control of what happens. These principles and positions only get you so far because what actually happens is that you don't carefully chart your way through life. You are picked up by a wind every now and again and dumped down somewhere else."

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki. Although he moved to England when he was only five years old, he says: "Nagasaki is not just a few hazy images. I remember it as a real chunk of my life." He and his older sister, Fumiko - another sister, Yoko, was later born in the UK - moved to Guildford with their parents when their oceanographer father, Shizuo, embarked on a two-year research project. "My father is not the average Japanese salaryman and my parents didn't have the mentality of immigrants because they always thought they would go home at some stage," he explains. The children were kept ready for their return by relatives sending Japanese educational materials and it wasn't until Ishiguro was 15 that a final decision was made to stay, when his father was offered, and turned down, a university post in Tokyo. His parents still live in the same Guildford cul-de-sac, although "they still very much think of themselves as Japanese and still find it interesting to discuss 'the English'". Ishiguro attended the local state primary school where a progressive headmaster encouraged freedom of choice in study, which meant he did very little maths but spent a lot of time inventing spy stories. Despite this he won a place at Woking County Grammar school on an interview - "I think it was a system that allowed middle-class kids who messed up the test to get in" - where he was the only "non-white kid" in the school. For a while he was called "Ish da wog" which later mutated to "Ishdar". He is now almost universally called Ish or Ishy. Tony Beagley, a friend then and now, says although it sounds shocking "I really don't think those names were meant nastily. He was just the unusual bloke in the school and I can't recall any bullying or him getting a hard time because he was Japanese." Ishiguro, who was elected form captain in his first year, agrees. "It was a very, very different climate. Even by the time I was in the sixth form those names had gone."

The Ishiguros were active churchgoers - he later became head chorister - but says he is still surprised "at the generosity and neighbourliness that met us", just 15 year after the war. "People were incredibly kind to our family and went out of their way to help." He says the war was openly talked about at home (his mother, Shizuko, survived the Nagasaki atomic bomb aged 18) and outside. But the only times he can remember being uncomfortable were when playing war games at primary school, "where [I] would always campaign for us to fight against the Germans not the Japanese", and when his mother was snubbed by a neighbour who had been a Japanese prisoner of war. "We didn't even know about it until then and he had always been very nice to us. He just had this flashback when he saw my mother that time and his wife apologised for it straight away."

Woking Grammar was a very traditional school that provided him with "probably the last chance to get a flavour of a bygone English society that was already rapidly fading". He remembers the standard of art and music being very high. "My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation. We would endlessly discuss the relationship between words and music and how they had to come alive within the context of performance." Ishiguro remains a serious guitar player with a collection of different instruments. Beagley, who has played music semi-professionally since school, recalls that Ishiguro was "fairly quiet and a bit of a swot, but in musical terms he was very much the director and was always quick to suggest a way of doing something or phrasing something that he thought might be interesting. And he was, and is, pretty good. He can certainly entertain people and I don't think the quality of his stuff would get people leaving in droves."

Ishiguro left school in 1973 and took a gap year, during which he hitched around America and acted as a grouse beater for the Queen Mother in Balmoral. He went to Kent University in 1974 to read English and philosophy but took time out from his course to work as a resettlement worker for the Renfrew social work department in Scotland. "I had the idea that I wanted to do something 'more real' and I did learn a lot of things very rapidly up there. When I came back I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends."

He graduated in 1979 and got a job as a residential resettlement worker for the West London Cyrenians homelessness charity in Notting Hill. Marie Johanssen, a colleague, remembers him as being adept at working with a demanding client group, despite minimal training. "He was very genuine and honest and down-to-earth with them," she recalls. "I've worked in related fields all my career and looking back we dealt with some difficult people who were very unwell. They weren't just homeless, they were seriously mentally ill. Some of the people and situations we had to deal with were extremely difficult but we were young and keen and we just did our best."

While at the Cyrenians, Ishiguro met Lorna MacDougall, a social worker who later trained foster parents. They married in 1986 and have a daughter, Naomi, who is 13 this year. Ishiguro says a lot of his values were formed in those years. "I still have a suspicion of charity and think the state has a role to play in many areas. And although for most of the years since I have been a rather privileged writer, I identify more closely than perhaps I should with those social workers. Had I not become a writer that would have been me. Lots of our friends are still in that world and I do feel part of that generation of people who were rather idealistic in the 70s and became disillusioned in the 80s. Not just about social services issues, but the world."

Ishiguro, no great reader at this stage, says virtually the only contemporary writers he was aware of were Margaret Drabble and Edna O'Brien, although he later discovered, and was influenced by, other work from the period by VS Naipaul and JG Farrell. It was after reading Drabble's Jerusalem the Golden - "on a whim" -that he thought he might write a novel and while still working for the West London Cyrenians in 1978 he sent a radio play, called Potatoes and Lovers (about two young people who fall in love but can't acknowledge that they're both cross-eyed), to Malcolm Bradbury as an application for a place on the Creative Writing MA course at the University of East Anglia. "In those days if you applied you got on," he laughs. "The year before the course hadn't run because not enough people applied. The year after me it didn't run. It was completely unknown."

Novelist James Sorel-Cameron was a fellow student at UEA and remembers Ishiguro as "very quiet and unassuming, but his writing was wonderfully confident". The two men presented joint seminars, "which were pretty bad for me because his work was so good", says Sorel-Cameron. "He was the star of the group but he wasn't aggressive or competitive. He was just terribly good." Bradbury described Ishiguro's work of the time as "retained, recessive, low-key, powerfully effective. As a student he was absolutely conspicuous." Ishiguro's other tutor, Angela Carter, claimed his prose "achieves an elegiac sobriety, and a kind of sweetness. It is very grown-up for a young lad!"

Ishiguro says that Bradbury and Carter encouraged a seriousness about writing but made it clear there was little prospect of making any money from literary fiction. "The idea of a successful novel was something that was reviewed in the Observer and then sank without trace," he says. "Literature wasn't a happening thing in those days. Music and fringe theatre and television playwriting were far more exciting. Someone like Angela lived at a time that was very hard on writers. Things changed very soon afterwards. But back then serious novels were nothing to do with money or fame. They were minority arts stuff and the glory would come from people respecting your work."

In fact, Faber picked up three of his short stories for a showcase of new writers. "I didn't know whether this was a breakthrough or not. But they asked if I had anything else and I had my first publishing lunch. I gave them 30 pages of A Pale View of Hills , which was my thesis for the MA, and they offered me a £1,000 advance. It was the same as my student grant at the time, and so I lived off that and wrote the rest of the book."

Robert McCrum, now Observer literary editor, had just been appointed fiction editor at Faber and remembers the long-haired, bearded Ishiguro arriving at the office in ripped jeans, carrying a guitar and a portable typewriter. "What you look for in a new writer is a voice and here was a voice with tremendous authority. It is very, very rare and you can't mistake a line of his writing as not being his. The reviews were absolutely remarkable for a first novel, but the way he has conducted his career since has also been so impressive. It is the mark of a great artist whether they conduct their career well or badly and he has thought very carefully about what he wants to achieve."

A Pale View of Hills was published in 1982, by which time he was again working for the West London Cyrenians. Ishiguro has written that it was a time when the British literary world had grown weary of the Hampstead novel and was "turning to the book with the large global theme". Ishiguro's debut was narrated by a Japanese widow living in England, looking back over her life in post-war Nagasaki in the light of her daughter's recent suicide. "I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs," he explains. "I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff, so although A Pale View of Hills was very close to being the first fiction I had written, I had already found this pared-down style, having been through pulling at the outer reaches of language in my earlier lyrics. If you look at my last songs and first short stories there is a real connection between them."

The year after publication, in the last piece of journalism he wrote, Ishiguro assessed the impact of setting his book in Nagasaki. He felt the shadow of the bomb induced respectfulness in reviewers and "even gaps in my imagination of knowledge were taken for commendable restraint in the handling of potentially sensational material". But the story was never "about" the bomb or Japan and he was more concerned that the ending, where the narrator conflates her story with that of another woman from her own past, was "a little too baffling. People seem to spend too much energy working on it as if it was a crossword puzzle and that wasn't my intention. But I don't regret it as it was the best I could do at the time."

When Ishiguro was included as the youngest member of the 1983 best of young British writers, he wasn't a British citizen. He took citizenship later that year as a very practical decision. "I couldn't speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligible for literary awards. But I still think I'm regarded as one of their own in Japan."

Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami agrees that Ishiguro is admired and widely read in Japan. "Partly it's because they are great books, but also because we find a particular kind of sincere and tender quality in his fiction, which happens to be familiar and natural to us." That said, Murakami doesn't care if Ishiguro is Japanese, English, "or even a Martian author", noting that his depiction of Japanese people and scenery is "slightly different" from the reality, while his "very English" setting of The Remains of the Day is familiar to Japanese readers. "In other words, the place could be anywhere, the character could be anybody and the time could be any time. Everything supposed to be real could be unreal, and vice versa. It is a sensation I love and I only receive it when I read his books."

Ishiguro eventually gave up his day job late in 1982 when he was approached to write a screenplay for the BBC, The Gourmet, and A Profile of J Arthur Mason for Channel 4, which prefigured The Remains of the Day in featuring a butler. Later this year, The White Countess , which he scripted for the Merchant Ivory team that produced the Oscar-winning film version of The Remains of the Day , will be released. Its pre-war Shanghai setting is the same as that of When We Were Orphans but it features a family of White Russian exiles.

An Artist of the Floating World (1986) reinforced Ishiguro's reputation and was shortlisted for the Booker, as well as winning the Whitbread. His account of a Japanese artist reassessing his responsibility for promoting pre-war militarism further cemented the impression that he was somehow explaining the Japanese mind to the west. Although with The Remains of the Day he radically changed location, his English country house was no more an attempt at social realism than had been his Japan of the 30s and 40s. It was the characters' management of their actions and memories that interested him and his first three books are closely related in terms of style, theme and technique.

"But after Remains of the Day I felt I had almost written myself into a corner," he says. "You could say I'd rewritten the same novel three times and I thought I had to move on. The success of the book, and then the movie, had by then also created a commercial expectation and I remember touring America and seeing people in the audiences who I thought might not want to read the books I wanted to write next. My constituency had become broader, but more mysterious to me."

The Unconsoled apparently made him more mysterious to them, but the book's critical stock has continued to rise. "It is a book you have to inhabit over a period of days," explains McCrum, who describes it as a masterpiece. "It can't be picked up lightly, but it is haunting and stays with you." Barry Lewis suggests that the later work, in particular The Unconsoled , will continue to be reassessed favourably. "I don't suppose it will ever be huge bestseller material, but he was doing something very new in that book and in this day and age an ambitious artistic failure is no bad thing because so much is safe and predictable. In that sense it is an important work just as Finnegans Wake is an important work. It might be a dead end in some ways, but at least it tries to move things in new directions."

Lewis says he has doubts about some of the "mechanical plot elements" of the Whitbread and Booker-shortlisted When We Were Orphans , but sees Ishiguro's work as continuing to reveal itself in the most interesting ways. "It seems to combine features from the earlier books that have been attractive to readers while also attempting to smuggle in those more disturbing and outlandish elements. It is an area he has made entirely his own."

Just as Ishiguro's earliest novels were taken by reviewers as studies of Japan, his latest book, Never Let Me Go , has already been tagged as sci-fi because of his use of clones. "But there are things I am more interested in than the clone thing," he says. "How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter? Most of the things that concern them concern us all, but with them it is concertinaed into this relatively short period of time. These are things that really interest me and, having come to the realisation that I probably have limited opportunities to explore these things, that's what I want to concentrate on. I can see the appeal of travel books and journalism and all the rest of it and I hope there will be time to do them all one day. But I just don't think that day is now."

Kazuo Ishiguro

Born: November 8 1954, Nagasaki.

Educated: 1966-73 Woking County Grammar School; '74-79 University of Kent; '79-80 University of East Anglia.